Maggie, being many years his junior, could not think of addressing him by his first name, and she felt that it was not seemly to use the prefix, so again she followed her mother’s example, and addressed him as her mother did Murphy, senior, as “Da.”

It was in the early eighties that Maggie and John Corbett decided to come farther west.  The cry of free land for the asking was coming to many ears, and at Maggie’s table it was daily discussed.  They sold out the contents of their house, and, purchasing oxen and a covered wagon, they made the long overland journey.  On the bank of Black Creek they pitched their tent, and before a week had gone by Maggie Corbett was giving meals to hungry men, cooking bannocks, frying pork, and making coffee on her little sheet-iron camp-stove, no bigger than a biscuit-box.

The next year, when the railroad came to Brandon, and the wheat was drawn in from as far south as Lloyd’s Lake, the Black Creek Stopping-House became a far-famed and popular establishment.

CHAPTER II.

THE HOUSE OF BREAD.

Across the level plain which lies between the valley of the Souris and the valley of the Assiniboine there ran, at this time, three trails.  There was the deeply-rutted old Hudson Bay trail, over which went the fabulously heavy loads of fur long ago—­grass-grown now and broken with badger holes; there was “the trail,” hard and firm, in the full pride of present patronage, defying the invasion of the boldest blade of grass; and by the side of it, faint and shadowy, like a rainbow’s understudy, ran “the new trail,” strong in the certainty of being the trail in time.

For miles across the plain the men who follow the trail watch the steep outlying shoulder of the Brandon Hills for a landmark.  When they leave the Souris valley the hills are blue with distance and seem to promise wooded slopes, and maybe leaping streams, but a half-day’s journey dispels the illusion, for when the traveller comes near enough to see the elevation as it is, it is only a rugged bluff, bald and bare, and blotched with clumps of mangy grass, with a fringe of stunted poplar at the base.

After rounding the shoulder of the hill, the thick line of poplars and elms which fringe the banks of Black Creek comes into view, and many a man and horse have suddenly brightened at the sight, for in the shelter of the trees there stands the Black Creek Stopping-House, which is the half-way house on the way to Brandon.  Hungry men have smelled the bacon frying when more than a mile away, and it is only the men who follow the trail who know what a heartsome smell that is.  The horses, too, tired with the long day, point their ears ahead and step livelier when they see the whitewashed walls gleaming through the trees.